Exploring Engaging Learning with Engageli

Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, delighted with today's conversation we're going to have about the company Engagely. It's been one of the hot companies that's been birthed out of this pandemic and in my mind, filling an incredibly important role in elevating the importance of engaging active learning that actually sparks learning itself, not just the act of teaching. To here to tell us about it is the CEO and founder. I will bring him up. Dan, thank you so much for being with us today. I'm tremendously excited to learn more about all the things that you all have put in motion at Engagely. But let's start with telling the audience just a little bit about the founding story. How did you all get started on forming the company and the problem that you're trying to solve by creating it?

Thank you very much for inviting me, Michael. About a year and a half ago, Silicon Valley, where we live, went from life as usual to a lockdown in a very short period of time. And our two teenage daughters, who were both high school students at the time, suddenly got thrust into Zoom school. And within less than a day they figured out how not to be paying attention in class by simply turning off their microphone, turning off their camera. One of my daughters went in a very methodical way through the Netflix catalog and other was improving daily her scores at Sims. My wife, Daphne Kohler and I know quite, quite a bit about distance education since as you know Michael, Daphne was a co founder of Coursera and I was on Coursera's board from the inception of the company. Daphne and I left the Coursera board a few years ago and obviously since the company's always done well and since then we have not basically thought that Zoom is the only way to teach. And we definitely felt that for something as important than learning and teaching, and as you said, learning is very important, not just teaching, you need a custom built system. And because the whole transition was so fast, we thought that there was probably some system for synchronous education. Just our daughter's school had no time to find it. So we set about looking for it and much to our candid surprise, we did not find one. And so we very quickly invested some of our personal capital plus raised an additional significant amount of money from our friends and family and launched Engagely to basically build a purpose built platform for the sole purpose of teaching and learning. Now our focus, even though it started with observing our high school aged kids, our focus has always been on higher ed because we know it well. From Coursera and B. Because we do believe, and that seems to be the case, that school age kids are going back to in person. Well, as you well know, for many years now there's been a gradual increase in the amount of education that's delivered digitally to higher ed students and obviously the pandemic accelerated it and there's no going back. And also, as you well know, more than half of the students in the US are non traditional students. And for these working adults, online education is far superior in many cases to the regular need to at the end of a long workday to have to get in the car and drive for an hour in traffic jams to go attend the one hour class and then drive back. And the last thing I would say is generally in higher ed classrooms tend to be large, especially for the courses that are super hard to go into, which are these large intro classes. And we just always felt back even when I was a student and back when Daphne was teaching students at Stanford, that there's got to be a better way to do it than shove a few hundred students in an auditorium with a professor sitting on the stage with lights shining in their eyes, the students not feeling like they're engaging with anybody, definitely not with the professional professor and definitely not with their peers. And so we really believe that for many of the types of education in higher ed that are being delivered today, what we can do with a purpose built online platform will provide the superior experience to both students and to the professors.

So there's a bunch of things that you just said there that I'd love to unpack and dig a little bit deeper into because I think it's created a solution unlike anything else that I've seen on the market as well. But let's start with where you ended in terms of that lecture based, very passive experience, sort of broadcast. Right. One to many experience. And what you all saw as the imperative around what I would call active learning and the research around that specifically. What, what, how did you all come to this idea that active learning and engagement was so critical and sort of overthrowing that paradigm of in some ways, you know, what Coursera started with, which was these broadcast lectures.

So very early on, even before Coursera was a project at Stanford, Daphne started experimenting back in the 90s with recording snippets over class with a tend to make the classroom much more active and engaging. So the actual material delivery, it's what today would be called the flipped classroom. Interestingly enough, the school that my daughters go to, their motto is learning by doing it's always been active learning. They literally let kids figure out many of the fundamental laws of physics on their own by experimenting. And I mean, like you said, Michael, there's huge amount of studies showing that active learning does produce much better comprehension, retention, overall, better learning outcomes. And as we all know, and by the way, I was just finished listening to Adam Granson, a new book which is quite interesting, Think Again, where he cites studies that show the students actually prefer an entertaining lecturer standing on a stage and early and getting entertained. But the learning outcomes are far.

Yeah, people love to relax and enjoy. Right. Rather than do the work.

Exactly, exactly. Unfortunately, when they relax, they're also not learning as much. And so the trick is how to do make it engaging for the students so they do lean in. And again, it can be done. I mean, the good instructors that have been doing this for a long time, for example, Eric Mazur Harvard and other professors, have proven that done right, students actually prefer it. So in addition to the improved outcomes, retention and so on, you definitely can do it in a way that engages the students, because especially somebody who is interested in the material, if they get to engage in it, they will basically derive pleasure from it as well as a better understanding of it.

That seems like an important nuance there and sort of amplification on my question, which is active learning produces better learning gains, but it's not necessarily relaxing and enjoyable. We know humans like to do the least work possible. That's sort of the natural state, if you will, of. Of our being. But what you just said is engagement to make it enjoyable so that they're excited about doing this. Active learning is so important. Am I catching that? Right? And how specifically do you move from just an active platform to one that's actually fun and engaging?

If so, so that's a great question. So there's one extra hook we added, which is what makes it, in my opinion, work much better, which is it's very collaborative. So if you just are sitting by yourself or students sitting by themselves in front of a computer and they have to solve problem after problem, that's pretty boring if they're doing it in collaboration with peers. And by the way, we saw it in all the examples that I'm sure you can cite, that retention becomes at least 3x better in MOOCs. When multiple students are taking a MOOC together. Again, you could, I'm sure, go back to when you're a student, Michael. I mean, most of the work you did, I'm sure, was in study groups. Same as it was for me and study groups. I mean, you can't kind of, you know, weasel out of doing the work, right? Because basically, you're sitting with your friends. You're not gonna let them down. And so that's why in engaging, we put everybody at the table with their peers. And the idea behind our table is everybody at the table can see and hear each other while the instructor is talking. Now, initially, instructors are very disconcerted by this. What you mean the students are talking when we're talking? And I tell them, look, you know, you can pretend it's not happening online, but it's happening. Because I can tell what the students do is they turn off their mic, turn off the camera, and basically run a FaceTime session with their friends or one of the 20 other video conferencing systems that they like to use. And then what? Many instructors found out that it actually becomes much more inclusive. For example, let's say you have shy students. So a shy student is listening to the class on their own, and they don't understand what's going on. They are going to be hesitant about raising their hand and asking a clarifying question. What happens at a table? They're sitting with their friends. Oh, the professor is saying something. I can ask Michael, can you please clarify what the professor said? Now, you're still hearing the professor, but nobody else is hearing the conversation between you and I. And so it's not disrupting the rest of the students in the class. Now, if you know the answer, that's great. It's beneficial for you because it reinforces your learning. Because by dint of explaining it to me, it deepens your knowledge of the matter. If you don't know, and I don't know, maybe you're much braver than I am. So then you'll raise your hand because you figure out you're not the only one who's not understanding and say, hey, we don't understand this point. Could you please clarify? And we've definitely seen that happen all the time in classes, by the way, as a somewhat aside. But it even broadens the inclusivity to people with special needs because of the way we've built the platform, in addition to the usual closed captioning and zooming of the fonts so people with visual challenges can see more clearly and support the screen readers. Our tables allow an institution to put narrators at tables with people with special needs. So let's say you have a student with dyslexia or a student that has visual challenges. They can sit at the TABLE with a narrator. And again, we mix audio because we have full control of all the audio video streams, because we built it from scratch so we can mix audio from the instructor with the narrator saying, well, now the instructor is showing the slide and if somebody as a question they can ask the narrator, can you please explain a bit more what the slideshows? And the narrator can answer that the same, by the way, with people with hearing challenges. You could have an ASL interpreter just sign back and forth to the student in a way that's not self conscious because nobody else is seeing that interchange.

It's interesting, there's a lot to unpack there, but it sounds like, broadly speaking, using these social dynamics of people wanting to engage with others, not wanting to be the one that perhaps didn't do the work, but then starting to get comfort and security and others and things like that, you use a lot of these different principles to engage individuals. I'm curious because you mentioned when you started the company that you looked around and you didn't see anything doing exactly what you're, what you've created. I'm just curious to get your editorial a little bit because from an active learning perspective, it seems like Class by Michael Chasen that came out during the Pandemic, but also the Minerva project, which was, you know, several years before the pandemic, that they're doing some of the same sorts of things, although maybe not necessarily all the social aspects that you've embedded. So I'm just curious to sort of get your reflection about how you compare to some of the other offerings in the market and what are the key differences that you see.

So after running two companies in Silicon Valley, I spent a few years as a venture capitalist. And when people came to my office and told me they have no competition, I always said I've never been in a open air market that only has one stall. So definitely when there's an important market like the one we serve, are going to be other people addressing it specific to these two companies you raised. So first of all, Class and Gagely started about the same time and they very specifically have decided to duct tape a bunch of features on top of Zoom. So they're basically, basically held back by all the limitations that Zoom have. It's not a custom built platform. They just basically there are a few features of arguable benefit on top of Zoom. And basically if you look at all their propaganda, it's all they're trying to draft behind the huge momentum that Zoom as a result of the pandemic, also by the way, you need to download software while engaged. No software download is needed. It's all browser based. Minerva started about the same time that Coursera started with that company from the beginning, if you recall, they actually started by being a university that didn't quite work out for them. And so they are trying to use a platform they developed at other universities. But it's a they come to university and tell them, we're going to give you a platform, we're also going to tell you how to teach. Very few universities are greatly interested in learning how to teach. Maybe as a sign of the progress, forget the fact that you know the numbers have been publicly saying is that they have a few thousand students, where as you know, Coursera, that started at the same time as close to 80 million students. But even Engagely, which started way after then, we already have more students using our platform than they do. I don't think what they're doing is particularly scalable. And I mean, I think there's what, over a billion people that can use our product easily. So having the solution that addresses a few thousand is just not interesting.

It's interesting because part of that then seems like an intentional choice, right? Not to ride the momentum of Zoom and to custom build your own platform, which would seem to have some more adoption hurdles, I suppose up front. But obviously you've built it for low bandwidth settings and done a bunch of things to try to make it more accessible. And then the other piece of integration you noted with Minerva is not just its technology platform, but also the integration with the curriculum and the pedagogy and how it's used and so forth. It's interesting that you sort of have found a middle ground or sweet spot, it sounds like in between the two, where it's your own platform, but you're giving more freedom to how it's used. And on that note, I've been so interested by one of the things that I've been reading about what you all are doing, which is it's not just for these pure online settings where you're synchronous, you're using it in asynchronous online settings, you're using it in what's become known as high flex settings, but where some students are in person, others are virtual and you're doing it, I think, in full in person sessions as well. I'm just, that's a huge array of use cases. I'm curious how you've been able to create that flexibility because that offers the promise of not just improving or transforming the online experience, but frankly, all of higher education learning.

Yeah. Thank you very much for another great question. So I've always been interested in vertical integration. Now, when we started the company, my very longtime business partner, Serge Plotkin, who, like Daphne, was a tenured Stanford computer science professor, and I, this is a third company Serge and I are doing together. We read very carefully the public zoom APIs very carefully and realized that for the wealth of features we want to provide, the learners and the instructors simply cannot build it on top of Zoom. So beyond, like you said, the adoption hurdles, there's also a huge technical lift. I mean, Zoom spent hundreds of millions of dollars and 10 years building their platform. We built a richer video conferencing system in less than a year. Now, by the way, the way we did it is first of all, we do 24 hour day software development. So we have a team in the valley, we have a team in Israel, and we have a team in the Ukraine. So we literally are doing 24 hour a day development. And B, even though Google Meet does not get the credit it I think deserves, Google has put a huge amount of into the browsers today, which are based on open standards, as opposed to the closed ones that Zoom has, which we fully utilize. This is why our system is completely browser based. Just by the way, like what you and I are using now, it's all browser based also. So nothing. We didn't need to download anything right now. But it did require a huge amount of development. But it turns out that companies that vertically integrate tend to be more valuable. So I ran during the 90s, a company that built the hardware and software that made color printers. And we basically built everything from scratch, the chipsets, the software, and it became a very valuable company. My most successful investment as a venture capitalist is I led the Series A in a company by name of SolarEdge, which is now a very valuable company. And SolarEdge builds electronics that go into every panel that extract more energy out of the panel. And they had some competitors who thought, that's enough and they'll use another company. There was a plethora of companies that did the inverters, which take the DC voltage generated by the panels and connect them to the grid. Solared said, no, they'll do the whole thing end to end. So they do the electronics in the panel, but they also build the inverters. And they came up with a way to dramatically cost reduce the inverters. And it turns out that the Solared system can be built for less than what the traditional inverter Gives you much more power, much more flexibility on how you put the panels on the roof, etc, etc, etc and they became by far the dominant company in their space. Now it did take a fair amount of money and time, but today they are the dominant company in that space. So having full control of your fate turns out to be the better way to go. And if we take and look at the richest man on the planet Today, you know, Mr. Musk, he decided not to take, you know, an existing off the shelf car, shove in a battery and electric motors and hope that from this he builds an electric car. He decided from the ground up to build an electric car. It works.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting because we. The question of scope of integration first, modularity, vertical integration versus more horizontal is something we think a lot about through the theories of Clay Christensen, obviously. And it's interesting because in the early parts of industries, vertically integrated solutions almost always win because otherwise the technical immaturity, technological immaturity, is such that you can't wring enough performance out of a standalone component unless you, as you said, wrap your hands around the solution. What I think is interesting is you made the conscious decision not to though, vertically integrate into, into the curriculum and pedagogy as well as Minerva did, recognizing that that's actually a, that's an interdependence, if you will, with the existing system, that's probably more like a brick wall. And so it's that right level of scope. And then the other interesting thing you just said is I do think that there's a bit of trend. I'm curious your perspective as a, you know, someone who is investing. There seems to have been a bit of a trend for several years in the VC industry to look down upon companies that wanted to own the full chain and vertically integrate. And I think in many ways hamstrung a lot of promising opportunities because they didn't allow them to sort of grab hold of the new distribution channels, the new supply chains, et cetera, that they would need all in the name of capital efficiency, which to your point, in the long run was actually less efficient.

Definitely. By the way, I'm not investing anymore. I'm not focused on. Yeah, no, when you were all my time on Engagely. But I did spend, you know, a decade and a half in the venture capital space. So a few things. First of all, back to the vertical integration of the pedagogy. Tesla supplies the car, not the driver. And so that's why we're out of the pedagogy. We don't supply the drivers. Secondly, the first company Serge and I did together was backed by some of the best venture capitalists in the world, including Benchmark Capital, which as you know, backed some of the best companies on the planet. And one of their founding partners, Andy Ratcliffe, once told me that by the time VCs figure out that something is hot, it's too late. I think anytime VCs think that they know better than entrepreneurs how to build a business and it's never for the benefit of the business. And so I mean, look, you know, at Amazon is another example. I mean, they have their own warehouses now. They're even delivering the. They have their own delivery fleets, they build their own hardware. You know, Apple same. Right. I mean, there's always this huge argument between Apple and Dell. Dell said, oh, we'll just leverage the Microsoft and Intel investments in R and D and we'll just integrate and we'll do all right, well, look at the value of Dell and look at the value of Apple to.

Well, right, and that being the point that at a certain phase Dell was more valuable when the, when the world modularized. But then to re architect for the next generation, you needed to control the value chain again.

Exactly right. And by the way, I mean Apple keeps integrating even more vertically.

I mean right now, yeah, right now.

They'Re realizing they have their own chipsets, right? They're not even using Intel CPUs anymore, let alone off the shelf motherboard. So back to the point you raised before, about asynchronous and in person. One of the things we decided to do very early on in the product is put in the assessments. And our basically observation is almost all modern instructors have some form of a presentation they walk into a class with. In the olden days it was overhead projector type slides. Obviously we moved to the so PowerPoint keynote and Google Slides. What we do is we have created tags. These tags are little square images that look like QR codes but are not. And they basically provide instruction to our software what the instructor wants the students to see. So I'll give you a couple of examples. You could basically take a slide that has on it a question and some answers and put these little squares, these little tags by the answers and. And when the students see it, it does basically clickable answers. And so we automatically scan, look for these and automatically enumerate the answers. And the students just click. And immediately the instructor gets a live pie chart that they can share if they want with the students, showing how many students have selected each of the answers. So that is built in. So you could use that, like you said, in a high flex environment, you can use it in person. Another benefit, by the way, for in person students, whether it's just a full in person class or Hyflex, is we have notes embedded into our platform, so students can click on a button automatically grab a screenshot of the instructor's display, they can write on it, and at the end of the class, they can save everything to a editable document, like a Word document, or we basically save it for them also in the cloud. So that's a benefit that students have. And because students are motivated to use our solution in person, we use that for high flex because many classes still do not have fancy. And I don't think we'll ever have fancy microphone arrays. And by the way, my observation of these fancy microphone arrays, that as soon as they're installed, they're obsolete. I mean, think, Michael, how many rooms you've been in that have microphones scattered around them. Nobody knows how to use them. So at the end, somebody puts in the middle of the room an iPhone. And so the way we do it is when a student raises their hand, which is a button on our platform, which automatically puts them at the podium where they can be heard by the entire class. At that point, we mute all the other microphones in the room and only pick up the audio from that specific student. So we can hear very. The remote students can hear very clearly what the in person students are saying, so they're not feeling left out of what's going on.

Sorry. Keep going. Yeah.

Oh, sorry. And I just want to address quickly the asynchronous. So we carry this whole collaborative idea into the asynchronous realm. So when we basically filed our initial patents last summer, we came up with what now Disney calls a watch party. And so we implemented that in what we call the study hall. So let's say you and I want to see a class that Daphne is teaching. You and I can watch a recording of it together, even though we're in separate places and both of us have full control of the playback. So if you rewind, it rewinds with respect to me. If both of us are pausing it, we can discuss it, obviously. And we do have to, by the way, to respond to polls and quizzes as they happened in the live class. So our asynchronous experiences, we try to make it almost identical to the synchronous experience. It's collaborative, it's active, and we try to very Much blur the distinction between that and a full on real time class.

That part I think is fascinating because it strikes me that the evolution of online learning sort of started asynchronous, right? And extremely flexible. But the efficacy and engagement was very difficult in those traditional online environments. It moved to synchronous in the online program management world and we see a lot of that now. But now it's more inflexible. It's harder to accommodate people with lots of different schedules. And you're sort of taking the best of both, it seems, in this modality, which could dramatically expand the accessibility, which I guess is where I want to finish up our conversation around the reach and accessibility. Where are you seeing the most traction in the market? I don't know if you can give out numbers of reach and adoption, but I'm just curious, is this among online first universities, is this among traditional? Where are you really seeing the growth.

And traction and all of the above. So anything from very traditional universities which are seeing the benefit of online, to universities, even before the pandemic started building out, for all the reasons we discussed, a large online presence. It's really all above. And it's also, at this point we're in every continent with the exception of Antarctica. And I'm not sure that in Antarctica there is a higher ed institution.

We'll work on that one now so that the penguins can learn alongside. Right. But that's fascinating. I'm curious in terms of the traction, sometimes I've noted that faculty, their interests are more around the research agenda or other things, not the teaching and learning per se. How do you overcome that? Or where do you get faculty excited? Like what? What does that conversation look like?

It's another great question, Michael. So there's an adoption curve, you know, like there was, if you remember in the early days of Coursera, a small number of universities were willing to have a small number of instructors, but a small number of courses on the platform. Now there is a huge amount of courses. So definitely in a new institution, we start with instructors that are interested in teaching and learning. And by the way, very interestingly, there is actually a fair bit of overlap between instructors that are good at research and good at teaching and learning. Definitely. In addition to, as you know, got a huge amount of very fancy and famous awards, she also got teaching awards.

She's remarkable though, I would argue.

But yes, thank you. But good professors are interested in imparting their knowledge, not just developing more research. But by the way, in most elite institutions today, you cannot get tenure in Many of them, unless you're also above a certain threshold in terms of teaching and learning. And then if you look at, like you said, the very large institutions that have many students, many of the instructors are there mostly to teach. And so, yeah, I mean, it's like any new technology, there's an adoption curve. You start with early adopters that are enthusiasts and then you go through and eventually you get to the masses. So that's basically been our experience. One thing we have basically designed the product for is that if all you want to do is do exactly what you were doing in any video conferencing system, that is start talking. You can just start talking. You don't have to download anything. You basically click on a few buttons and you start talking. If you want to share your screen, great. Then students already get a benefit from the system because already sitting at tables. So all the functionality of the tables and by the way, we thought we'll need to onboard students. Students figure it out in a minute. So the students are already getting all the benefits of the tables, are getting the benefits of the note. And after a few sessions, instructor gets more comfortable. They start integrating into their class materials the polls and the quizzes, which doesn't take very long. Then they start thinking of clever active learning exercises and before you know it, they're using the system fully. And the last thing I would say is Andrino runs our teaching and learning, also ran for many years teaching and learning at Coursera. So it's not that we just tell people to go figure it out on their own. One of the biggest teams and we have in Engagely is a teaching and learning team which basically trains instructors and helps them with building their materials in a way that works great on our system. Again, we don't force it, but we're here to help.

Tremendous stuff, Dan and I hope next time we can have this conversation at one of the tables in engagedly because I just the way you all have set that up with the ability to bring people together then, but then break out in the tables and create all that social interaction around learning is just a tremendous design leap that I think escapes people when they probably first read about the move to active learning online platforms is my sense. Last question for me as we wrap up, what's next in terms of the roadmap? What can we expect in a few years from now? What are you excited about that maybe isn't here today but is gonna be the next thing that we say? Wow. So we're glad Engagely put that in place.

Thank You. So we're working on building out very large, very synchronous classes. So to do all this active and collaborative learning when you have a lot of students, and part of that will be to matchmaker between students that might be strangers so they can collaborate on projects. One of the things I forgot to mention is we collect a lot of what students are doing with the platform. We keep enhancing that, improving analytics down the road. And they'll take years. Want to have a huge body of knowledge. And you notice, Michael, I haven't sprinkled any machine learning fairy dust.

No, you haven't.

Yeah. But at some point we think that the plethora of data we collect can be used to provide to instructors and to students actionable suggestions what to do on both sides. So a few months ago somebody asked me, when are you done developing the platform? Said never. I mean, it's software, right? Right.

And you're going to see new opportunities that you probably wouldn't have imagined. I think as we wrap up, what I'll just say editorially is by building on the sound research that's already in place around learning and social engagement, the data you collect, I think is going to be much more sound than if you just started with an open platform without any rules or logic based on the research behind it. My suspicion will be that you'll be able to generate some insights that others won't have seen. And who knows, you may end up publishing some of those as research papers as well out of the platform because I think there will be a lot you'll be able to see. Yeah. So, Dan, thank you so much for joining and all of you for tuning in and catching this conversation. Engagely is definitely something that I think heralds this next wave of much more active learning and as we've heard, not just online, but in person, asynchronous environments which truly could bring the bigger revolution, which isn't just about technology enabled learning, but really just better learning environments to scale. So thanks so much and we'll be back next time.

Thank you very much, Michael.